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A New Deal for Geese

Sunday, May 14, 2017.

Their characteristic “sagacity, wariness, strength, and fidelity” made Canada Geese “models for man,” in the eyes of a naturalist Francis H. Kortright. What they were in the eyes of Franklin Roosevelt were a species worth preserving and, once in a while, a target and a meal. Photo by Gidzy via Wikipedia.

Driving home from picking up Oliver from work last night, we had to stop to let a band of Canada Geese cross the road...

Lance?

Yes?

Why did the Canada Goose cross the road?

I don’t know. Tell me. Why did the Canada Goose cross the road?

To get to the lake on the other side.

Wiseacre.

Hee hee hee

Ok. Moving right along…

The real question is what were they doing on that side of the road before they crossed. Probably shopping for nest sites in the bushes over there. It's that time. Anyway. There were about six of them, taking their time waddling across, seemingly unconcerned that they'd stopped traffic in both directions, all adult sized, but the four of them in the middle were likely last year's brood, with the father in front and the mother in back. Canada Geese mate for life, after, as I just read, an "aggressive courtship". I watched them with mild interest. I have nothing against Canada Geese but I take them for granted and forget that they can be quite interesting, although I've never thought as highly of them as the naturalist Francis H. Kortright did:

Sagacity, wariness, strength, and fidelity are characteristics of the Canada goose which, collectively, are possessed in the same degree by no other bird. The Canada in many respects can serve as a model for man.

They are beautiful, though, especially when seen collectively. My heart skips when, rounding a bend in the road along the river, I come upon rafts of them spread out upon the water. Sometimes. Sometimes I'm just bored.

It’s not the case that when you've seen one you've seen them all. It's just that when you're seeing one, you're routinely seeing a hundred, and it's a sight you've seen as recently as this morning and can expect to see again tomorrow. Canada Geese are not a species of rara avis.

But here's the thing.

At one time not that long ago they were or almost were---they were on their way, at any rate. You might be surprised to learn, as I was surprised to read in Rightful Heritage, Douglas Brinkley's biography of FDR as a conservationist, that around about 1935 the Canada Goose was a "threatened species".

Hard to imagine, I know. It's like finding out starlings or sea gulls or pigeons were endangered. If you live anywhere in the United States except, going by the map in my field guide, one small desert patch of Arizona and, weirdly, Florida----too many snakes and gators down there, I guess, not to mention the occasional panther, endangered as it is, and the geese know to steer clear---it probably seems there are just too many of them---between 4.2 and 5.6 million in the United States and Canada as of a 2015 count, according to Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology. Hunters in North America bag about 2.6 million a year "but this does not seem to affect its numbers."---for them to have ever been "threatened".

But apparently they were, critically enough that they needed special attention, which they got. From Franklin Roosevelt. Rebuilding waterfowl populations was a New Deal project as important to FDR as building dams and post offices.

Roosevelt's conservative opponents attacked his jobs programs, like the Civilian Conservation Corps, as wasteful and unnecessary make-work programs. To a degree they were make-work programs because of course they were! But the CCC had real work to do. It was right there in its name---Conservation. Wilderness conservation. Wildlife conservation. Forest conservation. Water conservation. Soil conservation. The CCC didn’t plant all those trees just to prettify the view. Prettifying the view was one of the goals. Roosevelt believed in the soul and mind restorative powers of natural beauty and he wanted all Americans to experience it which is why establishing and expanding national and state parks were high up on his To do-list. But along with their other functions, the trees were planted to hold down the soil. FDR was very serious about soil conservation. He had to be. The Dust Bowl was an ongoing national man-made catastrophe. And what hadn’t dried up and blown away in the Midwest and the High Plains was washing away elsewhere because for a couple hundred years and more farmers and loggers across the continent had been hell-bent on chopping down all the forests, and what the farmers and loggers had left standing, mining interests were intent on clear-cutting to expose the ground to their shovels, picks, bulldozers, and dynamite.

Roosevelt took special pride in the work of the CCC. Of all his New Deal programs, it was probably the one he identified with most, the one he felt was most expressive of himself. He assigned himself an active role in its running and planning and decision-making. He kept close track of what it was up to and was constantly offering suggestions---useful suggestions that grew out of experience and study. But then he was that way when it came to all his administration’s programs. He was not a micro-manager, Far from it. But he always knew what was going on and that meant knowing whether or not the problem was being addressed effectively and that meant understanding exactly what the problem was and how the work was designed to addressed it. Roosevelt never met a subject he didn’t make a point of learning as much about as he could. When he said farmers should plant more trees, he knew which trees would grow best where. When he talked about monetary policy with his economic advisers, he had not just an understanding of how money works but his own carefully thought-out ideas about how it should be put to work.

Amazing, ain't it? A President who knew things and understood them, who had ideas instead of passing fancies. Who interested himself in the workings and progress of policies and programs. Who could hold more than one thought in his head at a time. Who could hold onto a thought.

Roosevelt had firm ideas about soil management and land management in general that he’d been developing long before he became President. It was a practical preoccupation of his since he was young---FDR regarded himself as a farmer, with reason. The family’s Hyde Park estate was a working farm and Roosevelt took an active role in managing it.

He had firm ideas about wildlife management too.

He liked birds.

If soil conservation was a practical concern, ornithology was a passion. Birds were objects of delight and subjects for serious study his whole life. He was an amateur ornithologist only in that he never got paid.

The CCC’s jobs jar included reforestation and wetlands restoration with the expressed purpose of habitat restoration. The CCC helped create many wildlife refuges all over the country. One of them was Seney National Wildlife Refuge in Michigan. It was established along with a number of other refuges in 1935, and that's where, according to Brinkley, the reinvigoration of the Canada Goose population began.

Brinkley doesn’t get into how the geese came to be threatened and I can’t find the answer in my bird books, but I imagine it was the same way most wildlife comes to be threatened, by human beings behaving in their naturally selfish, short-sighted, ignorant, and greedy fashion. Over-hunting and habitat destruction along the migratory flyways were taking a toll on all waterfowl populations.

Each [National Wildlife Refuge] established in 1935 saved entire ecosystems from corruption by humans. Most had a particular species of waterfowl as a focus. The reason Rice Lake NWR was situated in a bog area of northern Minnesota was to help ring-necked ducks (Aythya collaris) hatch. Then there was Medicine Lake NWR in Montana, where the white pelican (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos) nested. In Arkansas, mallard ducks (Anas platyrhynchos) wintering in the Mississippi Flyway had 160, 756-acre home at the White NWR.

And at Seney “biologists built a fenced-in pond area to contain a crop of goslings and then trained them to establish a migratory pattern.”

By the way, just because he was out to save waterfowl populations, doesn't mean FDR was opposed to hunting ducks and geese or at all averse to hunting them himself.

FDR always preferred fishing to hunting but he did enjoy hunting for ducks and he was an excellent shot, having trained his eye from boyhood shooting birds for collection and study.

Shortly after the 1932 election, Roosevelt had arranged a duck hunt in Dutchess County. Struggling with his heavy leg braces, he had himself hidden in a Hudson River blind to wait for waterfowl to arrive in the cold sunshine...The president-elect was more used to fishing---in saltwater, following the menhadden toward trophy fish---but now he listened for the discordant, ethereal sound of ducks that had inspired hunters for millennia. Instead, five Canada geese (Branta canadensis)---black-beaked, with brown bodies and long necks---headed directly toward the blind. He took aim [with his shotgun] and fired. "I hit the leading goose, swung left to try to get another with my left barrel," he wrote to [his friend and conservationist ally] Senator Henry Hawes of Missouri, "and at that moment the first goose hit me a glancing blow on my right shoulder."

Brinkley doesn't say whether the goose hit FDR as it fell or if it kept flying after Roosevelt wounded it and crashed into its attacker in a last, desperate kamikaze goose attempt at revenge. But what I really want to know is who let Roosevelt wade into the river in his leg braces? The whole New Deal might have been drowned on the spot. One wrong step and, glub!---Alf Landon's the next elected president of the United States..

Anyway…

Canada Geese are thriving these days. It's to the point that many people see them as pests. Ever walk across a yard after a flock has been browsing there? Which reminds me.

One of Pop Mannion's last and most frustrating adventures as town supervisor was trying unsuccessfully to negotiate a truce between a pair of neighbors who disagreed about the relative pestilential nature of the many Canada Geese who visited their riverside neighborhood. One of the neighbors loved the geese and liked to watch them feed on the birdseed she spread on her lawn for them. The other neighbor objected to the noise and the fact that the geese didn't respect property lines and wandered over into his yard to see what was on the menu there and to demonstrate that the phrase “like shit through a goose” wasn’t just a folksy expression, and he wanted Pop to make the goose-friendly neighbor cease and desist.

Pop could not bring about a mutually satisfying resolution. He couldn’t tell the first neighbor which species of wildlife to invite onto her property, and he couldn’t make the second neighbor see that when you build your house next to a river you can’t expect the birds who call that river home will naturally confine themselves to the areas not owned by human beings.

I spent every other fall weekend on a marsh,
from an hour before sunrise to an hour after sunset,
from early October to early December
and never saw a Canada goose
except for a couple a wavy Vs miles overhead
on the day after freezeup

Now giant Canadas nest all over Iowa, seemingly in every
pothole and farm pond, and hundreds of thousands
congregate in a couple of the wildlife refuges in the fall

This success is a product of thoughtful government informed by science, acting over decades.